The Cairo Brief Read online

  Poppy and her world go to:

  www.poppydenby.com

  THE JAZZ FILES

  * * *

  POPPY DENBY INVESTIGATES

  * * *

  “It stands for Jazz Files,” said Rollo. “It’s what we call any story that has a whiff of high society scandal but can’t yet be proven… you never know when a skeleton in the closet might prove useful.”

  Set in 1920, The Jazz Files introduces aspiring journalist Poppy Denby, who arrives in London to look after her ailing Aunt Dot, an infamous suffragette. Dot encourages Poppy to apply for a job at The Daily Globe, but on her first day a senior reporter is killed and Poppy is tasked with finishing his story. It involves the mysterious death of a suffragette seven years earlier, about which some powerful people would prefer that nothing be said…

  Through her friend Delilah Marconi, Poppy is introduced to the giddy world of London in the Roaring Twenties, with its flappers, jazz clubs, and romance. Will she make it as an investigative journalist, in this fast-paced new city? And will she be able to unearth the truth before more people die?

  ISBN: 978-1-78264-175-9 | e-ISBN: 978-1-78264-176-6

  THE KILL FEE

  * * *

  POPPY DENBY INVESTIGATES

  * * *

  “Do you know who that is, Poppy?” asked Delilah. “I do indeed.”

  “So what does it feel like to dance in the arms of an assassin?”

  Poppy Denby’s star is on the rise. Now the Arts and entertainment editor at The Daily Globe, she covers an exhibition of Russian Art at the Crystal Palace. A shot rings out, leaving a guard injured and an empty pedestal in the place of the largest Fabergé egg in the collection.

  The egg itself is valuable, but more so are the secrets it contains within – secrets that could threaten major political powers. Suspects are aplenty and Poppy is delighted to be once again in the middle of a sensational story.

  But, soon the investigation takes a dark turn when someone connected with the exhibition is murdered and an employee of the newspaper becomes a suspect. The race is on to find the egg before the killer strikes again…

  ISBN: 978-1-78264-218-3 | e-ISBN: 978-1-78264-219-0

  THE DEATH BEAT

  * * *

  POPPY DENBY INVESTIGATES

  * * *

  Poppy looked up, her face pale, her hands shaking. “What is it, Poppy?”

  “Oh my, Rollo, oh my. I think we’ve just struck gold.”

  Frances Brody, author of the Kate Shackleton mysteries Poppy Denby is furious with Rollo, who has gambled away his position at The Daily Globe and is being banished to New York. That is, until she discovers he plans to take her with him to work at The New York Times!

  Poppy can’t wait to report on the Manhattan arts scene, but her hopes are crushed when she is allocated The Death Beat – writing obituaries. But Poppy has a nose for a story, and when a body is found in a luxury penthouse apartment she starts to investigate. She unravels a sordid trail of illegal immigrants, forced labour, sex scandals, and an unexpected ghost from her past.

  Poppy is determined to help the victims, but can she find the evidence to bring the perpetrators to justice without putting her own life in danger…

  ISBN: 978-1-78264-247-3 | e-ISBN: 978-1-78264-248-0

  DEATH OF A JESTER

  * * *

  DEB RICHARDSON-MOORE

  * * *

  “This is going to sound crazy. But there was a clown back there trying to lure a kid into the woods.”

  The police cannot decide if the clown sightings reported around Grambling pose a threat or are just a hoax. That is, until a young homeless boy is lured away from his parents in the dead of night. Malachi’s past is haunting him: he is pulled between the deep need to drink and drown his memories and his desire to try and find the little boy who was snatched from Tent City, right under his nose.

  Then a man dressed in a clown’s outfit is found bludgeoned to death. Can reporter Branigan Powers and Malachi help to bring the truth to light before the little boy is harmed, and before the wrong person is convicted of murder?

  ISBN: 978-1-78264-264-0 | e-ISBN: 978-1-78264-265-7

  CHAPTER ONE

  Malachi Ezekiel Martin didn’t know where he was. The dream placed him in the desert in Kuwait or Iraq – he had never known where he was over there either.

  He tasted grit in his mouth and saw the canvas roof of a tent overhead. Yeah, that would be the desert.

  The boy, he thought, looking around wildly. Where is the boy?

  He groped for the tent flap, fully expecting to look onto a barren, forsaken landscape, where everything, everything, was the color of sand – the tents, the uniforms, the rations always liberally sanded, impossible to keep out of your teeth. His head pounded, whether from the dream or from the crumpled empties of King Cobra, it was hard to say. He counted five of the forty-ounce malt liquor cans beside his sleeping bag.

  He peered outside now, squinting, anticipating rows of tents and buzz-cut men headed for chow; he braced for the impaling of the desert sun. Instead, he saw cool shadow and a single man, gray hair pulled into a ponytail, hunched over a fire pit with a teetering grill rack on top, coaxing a battered coffeepot to boil. Malachi shook his head, clearing the cobwebs, involuntarily looking around the campsite for the boy, though his brain was catching up, telling him there was no boy.

  Slick turned. “Coffee?” he offered.

  “Soon’s I pee.” Malachi stumbled from his tent, past the picnic table that held two-liter Cokes and cereal bars, cans of ravioli and chicken noodle soup, all the sugars and starches those church do-gooders thought homeless people wanted to eat. He shuffled past the river birch, its lime-green leaves newly sprouted to provide lacy shade over the entrance to Tent City. It reminded him of his granny’s doilies.

  By the time he rezipped his camo pants – dark green and darker green, not the sand and khaki of his Desert Storm uniform – he was back to himself, back home in northeast Georgia where the red clay beneath his feet was as familiar as the honeysuckled air. He shook a clean Styrofoam cup from a package on the picnic table, and let Slick fill it with his thick bitter brew. He dragged a rusting lawn chair to sit across the fire pit from his neighbor.

  “Where Elise?”

  “Aw, she in jail again.”

  Malachi knew better than to ask why. It could be drunk and disorderly or possession of crack or even assault, but most likely a prostitution charge was in there somewhere. He didn’t want to rub Slick’s nose in it.

  “Sixty days?”

  Slick shrugged. “Dunno. Guess we see her when we see her.”

  Malachi changed the subject. “Today Friday, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Farmers’ Market should be open soon. I’m ready for me some ’maters and cantaloupes.”

  Slick grunted. “Nah, too early. But Jericho Road be giving out that stuff, too. Pastor Liam said last Sunday.”

  Malachi thought of his grandparents’ farm, of the okra and beans and squash and tomatoes and corn and cantaloupes and watermelons and pecans and peaches it had produced so plentifully they’d sold the bulk of it at a vegetable stand. That was his job, sitting on a stool at the end of the driveway, welcoming visitors, talking up the produce, collecting money, counting change. Between customers, he got to read, which was fine with his granny. She was quite a reader herself and they’d swapped library books back and forth.

  That’s a job he’d like, sitting on a stool at the Grambling Farmers’ Market, ringing up produce. But he guessed those folks were all family members of the farms they sold from. They looked it, anyway, those farm-fed ladies with their tight perms and sleeveless flowered-y blouses from the Walmart. Not much call for outside help.

  He took a swallow of coffee and felt a grain of something on his tongue. He spit it out. “Slick, you got grounds in there. Or dirt.” He spit again. The dream of the desert resurfaced. There was always sand in his mouth in those days. That was probably why his mind had gone
there.

  He looked around, wondering what he wanted to do today. It was chilly here under the bridge but it was warming up out in the sun. He heard a rustle in the tangle of brush at the edge of camp and watched as a bird shot up.

  Slick spoke again but his voice was lower, and Malachi had to lean into the fire to hear him.

  “Family moved in last night.” He nodded at the railroad tracks atop the hill that divided their section of Tent City from the unimaginatively named Tent City 2. A towering bridge spanned acres of these woods, and small encampments could be found wherever it crossed flat ground. It wasn’t much, but the bridge did provide shelter from spring rains and summer’s brutal sun.

  “A family?” echoed Malachi. “You mean, with kids?” He hadn’t ever seen kids living out here. These inner-city woods hid tents for the lucky ones, cardboard and blankets for the not-solucky. But they didn’t hide kids.

  Slick nodded. “Look like a mom and dad and teenage boy and a passel of littl’uns. I think they been staying in a old VW bus and it broke down. Somebody give ’em a big tent.”

  “How you know they had a bus?”

  “Just what I heard.”

  “Aw, man.”

  Slick shook his head. “I know.”

  Malachi settled back in his rickety chair, taking another sip of coffee and getting another piece of grit. He put a finger in his mouth to snare it. It’d be worth a walk to Jericho Road to get a decent cup of coffee.

  As he rose, his eye fell on the bursting undergrowth crowding the far side of the camp, where the shade from the bridge gave way to the morning sun. Deeper in the woods, he saw a flash of white, billowing white. It looked for all the world like a flowing Kuwaiti robe, but surely that was one more remnant of his dream.